Dwindling Marriages Bode Ill for Birthrate

The number of marriages hit a record low last year. The total fertility rate -- the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime -- also hit a record low of 1.05 last year and will probably drop below one.

Advertisement

Only 264,500 couples got married last year, down 6.1 percent or 17,200 from a year earlier, according to Statistics Korea on Wednesday. That was the lowest since 1974, when the population was much smaller. Annual marriages exceeded 400,000 in the mid-1990s but plummeted to about 300,000 in 1997 and only 200,000 last year.

A researcher at a government-funded think tank said, "Young people are delaying marriage and fewer of them are getting married due to worries about unemployment, housing and child rearing".

The average age of first marriage was 32.9 years for men and 30.2 years for women last year, up 0.2 years and 0.1 years.

The drop will inevitably drive down the birthrate further in the coming years, considering that it takes about a year and three months (as of 2016) for newlyweds to have their first babies.

Meanwhile, more elderly couples are getting divorced amid overall drops in marriages and births. Some 33,100 such couples, who had lived together for more than 20 years, got divorced last year, staggering 1.3 times as many as in 2007 (25,000).

Overall, the divorce rate shrank 1.2 percent last year to 106,000 couples, but divorces increased among elderly couples. Divorcing couples who had lived together for more than 20 years (31.2 percent) outnumbered those who had lived together for fewer than four years (23.7 percent).